Sweet, Spangler, and Quantum Spirituality

Sweet,
Spangler, and Quantum Spirituality

by Warren Smith  (from
A “Wonderful”
Deception)

Lighthouse Trails
Research 

August 15, 2009

INDEX of previous
reports from Lighthouse-Trails

Emphasis added

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“If we want to possess a
magical crystal for our New
Age work, we need look no
further than our own bodies
and the cells that make them
up.”1 –David Spangler 1991

“I am grateful to David
Spangler for his help in
formulating this “new cell”
understanding of New Light
leadership.”2 —Leonard Sweet,
1991

Leonard Sweet, in acknowledging
Willis Harman,
Matthew Fox,
M.
Scott Peck, and the others he
refers to as “New Light leaders”
in Quantum Spirituality,
states:

“I believe these are among
the most creative religious
leaders in America today.
These are the ones carving
out channels for new ideas
to flow. In a way this book
was written to guide myself
through their channels and
chart their progress. The
book’s best ideas come from
them.”3

Speaking of spiritual
“channels,” Sweet expresses his
personal gratitude in Quantum
Spirituality to channeler
and veteran New Age leader,
David Spangler. Spangler, in
attempting to cast off the
negative stereotype of a New Age
channeler, would now more likely
describe himself as a conscious
intuitive.4 A pioneering
spokesperson for the New Age,
Spangler has written numerous
books over the years that
include Emergence: The
Rebirth of the Sacred,
Revelation: The Birth of a New
Age, and Reimagination of
the World: A Critique of the New
Age, Science, and Popular
Culture. His book
Revelation: The Birth of a New
Age is a compilation of
channeled transmissions he
received from his disembodied
spirit-guide “John.” At one
point in Revelation, Spangler
documents what “John” prophesied
about “the energies of the
Cosmic Christ” and “Oneness”:

“As the energies of the
Cosmic Christ become
increasingly manifest within
the etheric life of Earth,
many individuals will begin
to respond with the
realization that the Christ
dwells within them. They
will feel his presence
moving within and through
them and will begin to
awaken to their heritage of
Christhood and Oneness with
God, the Beloved.”5

Unbelievably, in a modern-day
consultation that bears more
than a casual resemblance to
King Saul’s consultation with
the witch of Endor (1 Samuel
28:7), Leonard Sweet
acknowledges in Quantum
Spirituality that he was
privately corresponding with
channeler David Spangler.6  In
Quantum Spirituality, Sweet
writes about what he calls his
“new cell” understanding of New
Light leadership, then closes
his book by thanking Spangler
for “his help in formulating
this ‘new cell’ understanding of
New Light Leadership.” Sweet
writes:

“‘Philosopher Eric Voegelin’s
word ‘cosmion’ refers to “a
well ordered thing that has
the character of the
universe.’ New Lights offer
up themselves as the cosmions of a mind-of-Christ
consciousness. As a cosmion
incarnating the cells of a
new body, New Lights will
function as transitional
vessels through which
transforming energy can
renew the divine image in
the world, moving
postmoderns from one state
of embodiment to another.”7

“I am grateful to David
Spangler for his help in
formulating this ‘new cell’
understanding of New Light
leadership.”8

Spangler: Still the New Age


In David Spangler’s 1991 book,
The Reimagination of the
World, Spangler makes it
clear that any “new cell”
understanding associated with
him is directly related to New
Age teachings. While Spangler
tries to distance himself from
the more narcissistic and
superficial aspects of the New
Age, he still holds firm to the
use of the term “New Age” to
describe his spiritual beliefs.
In fact, in referring to the
importance of a “new cell
understanding” of the New Age,
Spangler writes:

“To me, a more appropriate
symbol for the New Age is
the cell. The cell is really
a living crystal. It
possesses a highly
structured internal order,
yet this geometry is
organized around information
rather than around position,
as in a crystal lattice.
Protoplasm is highly
dynamic; it can give birth
to endless varieties of new
life, yet it can also
collect and focus energy in
powerful ways. If we want to
possess a magical crystal
for our New Age work, we
need look no further than
our own bodies and the cells
that make them up.”9

Was all of this part of the “new
cell” understanding that Leonard
Sweet received from David
Spangler? This paragraph
alone–much less Spangler’s well
documented “New Age work”
through the years–should be
enough to drive any Christian
leader far away from Spangler’s
heretical New Age teachings.
Sweet’s involvement with a key
New Age leader and channeler of
spirit-guides is not innovative
or edgy or pioneering–it is
spiritually dangerous. The Bible
instructs us to reprove and
expose the works of
darkness, not join forces with
them (Ephesians 5:11-13).

Leonard Sweet’s Quantum
Spirituality and David
Spangler’s The Reimagination
of the World were both
published in 1991. It seems
obvious from their books that
both men are attempting to
distance themselves from the
more faddish, consumer-oriented
elements of the New Age–but
without actually dispensing with
the term New Age itself.10

To
the casual reader, it might look
like Spangler and Sweet are
actually speaking against the
New Age. In fact, quotes taken
out of context might even make
it appear this is true. But this
is definitely not the case.
Sweet and Spangler are just
doing some New Age/New
Spirituality public relations.
They are both redefining and
refining the term New Age as
they try to strip the term of
its Shirley MacLainesque pop
aspects and put it more in the
realm of seemingly authoritative
science.  The term New Age would
no longer be associated with
occult spiritual beliefs but
rather with a period of time–a
new era–in which their
seemingly scientifically based
spiritual beliefs would
manifest.

It would no longer be
a New Age Spirituality. It would
now be a universal “New
Spirituality” for a new era–the
coming “New Age.” This New Age
would be equated with a
planetary era and a planetary
ethic that would reflect a
passionate concern for the
environment and all of humanity.
This new era would also reflect
the new “civility” called for by
Sweet’s “hero,” the late New Age
leader M. Scott Peck. In his
1993 book A World Waiting to
be Born: Civility Rediscovered,
Peck writes the following about
his Utopian New Age:

“The distinguishing feature
of the citizens of Utopia is
not their location,
nationality, religion, or
occupation but their
commitment to becoming ever
more civil individuals and
their membership in a
planetary culture of
civility. By virtue of this
commitment and membership,
regardless of their
theology, they welcome the
active presence of God into
both their individual and
their collective lives. . .
. Although their primary
allegiance is to the
development of their own
souls, they are all involved
in teaching as well as
learning civility and
dedicated to inviting others
into their planetary
culture.”11

Who is going to argue with this
call for ecological
responsibility, human
compassion, and planetary
“civility” in this coming New
Era–in this idealized New Age?
Only those who recognize that
New Age beliefs are being
smuggled in under the cover of a
new planetary ethic–a New
Spirituality and a New Worldview
for the coming New Age.

Leonard
Sweet and Brian McLaren would
also try to redefine the term
New Age more as a period of time
than as a set of occult beliefs.
Attempting to marginalize the
whole New Age movement by
characterizing it as “vague,
consumerist, undefined, and
mushy,” McLaren misses the fact
that the New Age is a
well-organized spiritual
movement with a long-standing
hostility to biblical
Christianity. The New Age is
very serious about what it
believes and is anything but
“mushy.” But as McLaren wrongly
defines the New Age as “mushy”
while simultaneously equating
biblical Christianity with
“pushy fundamentalism,” he paves
the way for a newly emerging
theology–a
New Spirituality for
a New Age. The term “New Age”
that characterized an occult
belief system neatly disappears
as the “New Age” simply becomes
the time frame in which this New
Spirituality appears. In his
book Finding our Way Again,
McLaren describes this New
Spirituality for the coming “New
Age”:

“The word spirituality tries
to capture that fusion of
everyday sacredness. For
many people, it represents a
life-giving alternative to
secularist fundamentalism
and religious
fundamentalism, the former
offering the world weapons
of mass destruction and the
latter stirring emotions to
put the suicidal machinery
into motion.

“This dissatisfaction in some
cases has led to a
reactionary resurgence of
pushy
fundamentalism–fearful,
manic, violent, apocalyptic.
And in other cases it has
led to a search for a new
kind of spirituality. The
success or failure of this
search will, no doubt, play
a major role in the story of
the twenty-first century.

“In its early stages, this
search for spirituality has
been associated with the
term new age, which for many
means something vague,
consumerist, undefined, and
mushy. However, in the
aftermath of September 11,
2001, more and more of us
are realizing that a warm
but mushy spirituality is no
match for hot and pushy
fundamentalism, of whatever
religious variety . . . More
and more of us feel, more
and more intensely, the need
for a fresh, creative
alternative–a fourth
alternative, something
beyond militarist scientific
secularism, pushy religious
fundamentalism, and mushy
amorphous spirituality.

“This alternative, we
realize, needs to be
creative and new to face the
new challenges of a new age,
a world gone
“post-al”-postmodern,
postcolonial,
post-Enlightenment,
post-Christendom,
post-Holocaust, post-9/11.
Yet it also needs to derive
strength from the old
religious traditions; it
needs to face new-age
challenges with age-old
wisdom.”12

Thus, the new semantics
introduced by both New Age and
Christian leaders–what had been
called New Age
Spirituality–would now be a
panentheistic New Spirituality
for a New Era and a New Age.
Leonard Sweet,
Brian McLaren,
and other Christian leaders were
slowly transitioning the church
into New Age teachings, but with
clever new terms like New Light
leadership, quantum
spirituality, New Spirituality
and a New Worldview that
will–for the “good of the
world”–transition the church
out of an “Old Age”/biblical
Christianity into the emerging
“New Age” of a New Spirituality.

In 1991, Leonard Sweet was
setting the stage for everything
happening in the church today.
He was saying what McLaren is
now saying. He was starting to
redefine the New Age as a New
Era rather than a set of occult
beliefs. In Quantum
Spirituality, he writes:

“The church stands on the
front lines of the coming
reign of God. Or as biblical
scholar J. Christiaan Beker
entitles his chapter on
Paul’s ecclesial thought,
‘The Church [is] the Dawning
of the New Age.’ The event
of Jesus Christ spells the
end of the old age and the
beginning of the new age.
The church then is the
‘beachhead of the new
creation,’ in Beker’s words,
‘the sign of the new age in
the old world that is
‘passing away.'”13

Thus while David Spangler, Brian
McLaren, and Leonard Sweet all
seem to be distancing themselves
from the New Age–they are
actually helping to bring it on.
They are bringing it on because
they hold to the basic New Age
view that we are all “one”
because God is “in” everything,
as Sweet shares in Quantum
Spirituality. To underline
this idea, Sweet turns to
contemplative mystic/panentheist
Thomas Merton. Sweet states:

“If the church is to dance,
however, it must first get
its flabby self back into
shape. . . . So far the
church has refused to dip
its toe into postmodern
culture. A quantum
spirituality challenges the
church to bear its past and
to dare its future by
sticking its big TOE into
the time and place of the
present.

“Then, and only then, will a
flattened out,
“one-dimensional,” and at
times dimensionless world
have discovered the power
and vitality of a
four-dimensional faith . . .
Then and only then, will a
New Light movement of
“world-making” faith have
helped to create the world
that is to, and may yet, be.
Then, and only then, will
earthlings have uncovered
the meaning of these words,
some of the last words
poet/activist/contemplative/bridge
between East and West Thomas
Merton uttered: ‘We are
already one. But we imagine
that we are not. And what we
have to recover is our
original unity.'”14

To continue (and for endnotes),
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here. (go to p. 128)

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Warren Smith’s work,

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